What are concepts and how do we learn them? This project proposes the view that many of our concepts, including concepts of social categories such as the concept of a woman, are atomic or simple – that is, many concepts are not bodies of descriptive information. It is notoriously difficult, however, to explain how we learn atomic concepts, because their simplicity means we cannot learn them by assembling them from the concepts that make them up. Using research in philosophy, artificial intelligence, and developmental psychology, the project seeks to explain how we might acquire simple concepts from perceptual encounters with their instances. Simple concepts are akin to “labels”, where a label plays the function of a name in thought. What is distinctive about labels is that the descriptive information associated with them is not constitutive of their identity, nor of their ability to refer.
This view of concepts has implications for “conceptual engineering”, the project of designing our concepts in a way that meets our scientific and social goals. In both historical and contemporary contexts, we find attempts to modify or revise our concepts – for example, the attempt to extend our concept of marriage to apply to unions of non-heterosexual couples. This attempt presumes that we can keep a concept relatively fixed while also changing some of its features or implications. The view of concepts this research project defends tries to explain what this modification of concepts amounts to. In this view, no single piece of descriptive information – for example, information about the gender of the people engaging in marriage – is essential to the identity of the concept of marriage and can thus be modified. This approach hopes to make sense of conceptual revision while also allowing for the continuity that seems to be required for genuine disagreement.
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© Paula Chowles
Prof. Nico Orlandi
University of California Santa Cruz (USA) | Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science
E-mail: nico.orlandi@college-uaruhr.de
Nico Orlandi is a philosopher of mind and of cognitive science. Their work draws on the history of philosophy and on contemporary research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and in computer science. Orlandi is currently working on a project on concepts – what they are and how we learn them – with a particular focus on concepts of social categories. In the past, Nico Orlandi’s research has focused on perception – what kind of capacity it is, what it presupposes, and what kind of relationship it affords with the environment. In their first monograph, Orlandi developed an anti-constructivist account of perception that contrasts with philosophical and psychological orthodoxy.
Nico Orlandi received their PhD in 2007, and in 2011, while at Rice University, received a Phi Beta Kappa teaching award. Orlandi spent one year as a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center (USA) in 2012 and was a visiting researcher at the Riken Laboratory for Perceptual Dynamics in Tokyo, Japan (2010), at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, France (2016), and at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy in London, Ontario, Canada (2019). Nico Orlandi is originally from Italy, was born in Siena and did their undergraduate studies in Florence. Orlandi is a first-generation academic.
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© RUB Katja Marquard
Prof. Tobias Schlicht
Ruhr-University Bochum | Philosophy of Consciousness and Cognition
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© RUB Katja Marquard
Prof. Tobias Schlicht
Ruhr-University Bochum | Philosophy of Consciousness and Cognition
Tobias Schlicht is Professor of Philosophy at Ruhr University Bochum’s Faculty for Philosophy and Education Science. His work is primarily focused on Consciousness and Cognition, topics at the intersection of philosophy and the empirical mind sciences, such as psychology and neuroscience.
Tobias Schlicht obtained his PhD in 2007 at the University of Cologne with a thesis on metaphysical theories of consciousness in light of the explanatory gap between physical and conscious processes. He has published three books on the mind-body problem and on social cognition. Three collections of papers cover questions about mental representation and on teleology, and a fourth one is currently in preparation on The Future of the Extended Mind (co-edited with Robert Rupert and Keith Harris) for Oxford University Press. He has also co-edited four special issues of academic journals on representation, predictive processing, and enactivism. His papers on topics in this area have been published in Philosophical Studies, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Philosophical Psychology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Frontiers in Psychology, Consciousness and Cognition, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, among others.
Personal Website: www.tobiasschlicht.com
Website
https://www.pe.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/philosophie/ii/bewusstsein/index.html.de